RESEARCH LETTER OF POLITICAL SCIENSE
Year:2012 | Volume:7 | Issue:1 (25)|Papers Count:9

In order to explain the concept of justice and its place in international arena, John Rawls formulates the principles that are arisen from international convention which can be reasonably and unanimously acceptable by all states, as a common and fair base. In examining the foreign policy of liberal democratic states, he measures and evaluates the relations of those states with other states, only with respect to the observance of mentioned principles on behalf of them. Thus, the relations of liberal democratic states with other liberal democracies (the so-called decent states) can happen freely and equally in all areas while those relations with the burdened states on the one hand and the outlaw states on the other are simply imaginable only in forms of economic assistance and just war respectively. In Rawls's viewpoint, this will be real meaning of justice in international arena. This concept today has provided the necessary theoretical foundations to justify the unilateral and arbitrary behavior of world powers in international arena.

Ghazali, the sufi, like other sufis has put emphasis on the importance of the science of insight (truth) rather than the science of outsight. From this perspective, interpretation is an endeavor to find out the insight meaning of a text. Thus, in the intellectual system of Ghazali, interpretation is somehow connected to the cognition of the wisdom and conscience of religious law (Sharia). Only Theosophy may cause the cognition elevate to the level of "wisdom", a level in which one experiences with what s/he knows with all his/her soul, i.e. an experience without the intermediary of God, where there is no more egoism left for the one (a state of self-abandoning or self-denial called "annihilation") and s/he is fully absorbed by God ("Eternity"). However Ghazali believed that the experience is not to substitute with philosophy and religion, but it is to supplement them and provide a basis and purpose for them.

This article seeks to conduct a pathological survey on the dictionaries and encyclopedias of Political Science and International Relations in Iran since the beginning of the 20th century when these two fields of science were established in Iranian universities. In this article we study around 100 dictionaries and encyclopedias of Political Science and International Relations in Iran including the descriptive ones, those bilingual dictionaries, and those with media and journalism emphasis. Our research findings indicate that the most important deficiencies of these dictionaries are as follows: some are influenced by political orientations, others explain political terms in accordance to some political parties' interests, some are unfamiliar with cultural symbols in various spheres of political knowledge in English & Persian languages, some are not precise enough in finding Persian equals of English terms, most are not written by political scientists who are familiar with Lexicography, many are unfamiliarity with modern methods and techniques of Lexicography, and least but not last many are not observing the regulations and standards of Lexicography. The article concludes with some recommendations for improving the status of the dictionaries/encyclopedias of Political Science and International Relations in Iran.

The study of the relation between ethics and politics and establishment of some sort of interaction between ethical and political theories, is one important scientific issue in the area of political philosophy. Khajeh-Nasiredin Toosi and Niccolo Machiavelli are among the philosophers and politicians who have discussed the modification of the relation between ethics and politics in their philosophical and political studies. Analyzing the stormy and unorganized era of the both thinkers and comparing their ethical and political theories, this article is to show why and how Khajeh-Nasiredin and Machiavelli present their theories with different extremities, idealistic and focused on Islamic and trans-global society by the former and realistic and focused on Italian and global society of his time by the latter. Moreover, inspired by the general approach of Thomas Spragens as well as the hermeneutics, in understanding the internal logic of texts, this article tries to show how these two philosophers reached to different conclusions in their theories.

Plato, in his famous political opus, "Republic", has formalized an Ideal state according to epistemological and ontological bases, which can be mentioned as the first comprehensive and coherent thought about politics. This Ideal state, from years ago, has been construed in different interpretations. The present article seeks to examine the distinctions of Plato's Ideal state from others by reading this Ideal state on the sociopolitical context of classical Greece on the one hand and Plato's intellectual and philosophical basics on the other hand. According to this reading, it seems that the sociopolitical characteristics of classical Greece and Plato’s intellectual and philosophical basics have caused that the Ideal (actual) state on Plato’s view be distinguished from any abstract Idealism, on the one hand, and Utopianism and Millenarianism on the other hand.

As a major contribution to the theory of ideology, Slavoj Zizek's ideology critique has some common backgrounds with discourse theory presented by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe but at the same time, Zizek emphasizes on his theory's radical consequences which are quite different from radical democracy because he believes that discourse theory has ignored the problematic of ideology. This article seeks to explain the differences between discourse theory and ideology critique in order to emphasize on the capabilities of the latter. Therefore after a brief review of the evolution of ideology, the author depicts the Lacanian concepts of Zizek's ideology critique. At the last part of the article, the critical semiology is added in order to provide a supplementary methodological instrument to this theory which is vague in terms of methodology.

One can say that understanding the political thought of Muslims in early Islam depends, on the one hand, on the study of the socio-political events of that time, and on the other, requires understanding of their conceptions of the Holy Quran and the Sunnah teachings. Thus to understand the political thoughts of this period, one has to put the Muslim conceptions of the texts in their socio-political context. In order to do this, it is important in our view to understand the debates regarding these events and how they have been judged referring to the religious texts. These debates, which were theological, formed different conceptions of religious texts. Studying two important events at that time- the Saqifeh and Seffin war-this article explains how the early theological debates were formed and consequently influenced the Muslim political thoughts of that time.